One more thing about the energy proposal...

President Obama made the announcement that I discussed in my previous post in front of an F/A-18 "Green Hornet", a combat jet that runs on a 50/50 blend of conventional jet fuel and biofuel.  The biofuel that the Hornet runs on is derived from camelina sativa, an oilseed that has been grown primarily in Montana after being brought over from Europe in the 1980s.  Camelina shows great promise as a biodiesel and biojet fuel feedstock, due to the fact that, in contrast to other biofuels such as corn ethanol and soybean biodiesel, camelina does not compete with food crops in its growth, harvesting, and production processes.  For every acre of corn grown to be used as ethanol fuel, that is an acre that is not being devoted to food production.  Multiply that scenario by the thousands of acres currently devoted to corn ethanol production and you have a scenario where the drive for energy is driving up the price of food, which I discussed in a post a bit over a year ago.

Camelina can be grown on "marginal" land, which refers essentially to non-farm-quality land, with minimum fertilizer and irrigation needs, so that the resource intensity of camelina development is far lower than resource-heavy corn production.  Thus, camelina and other second-generation biofuels show the way forward for biofuel development globally, a future where biofuel development is a sustainable enterprise that can coexist easily with food production processes.

I'm personally very excited about sustainable, domestically-produced camelina, due to the great national security risks that importing foreign energy presents to our country, and the fact that first-generation corn ethanol is simply not sustainable over the longer term from either an environmental or economic standpoint.  I produced a Powerpoint presentation and a research paper last fall about camelina that I have now posted on the right-hand column of the blog under "Recent Works," so if you have further interest in learning more about camelina and about biofuels more generally, I encourage you to take a look.